It’s November and the days are short, so it’s still dark when Billie Lyons leaves her apartment in Rocky Mountain House at 7 a.m. This is her first winter living here and she’s a little worried because the cold creeps into her bones and settles there, making it tough to think about anything other than getting warm. Meteorologists are predicting the coldest winter in a generation, but so far, so good: November or not, the first snow is melting into puffs of white on the gravel and grass, and when the sky lightens it will be deep autumnal blue – the same colour as Lyons’ eyes when they’re enlivened.

Much of the 20-kilometre drive to work takes Lyons through Crimson Lake Provincial Park. The landscape is all foothills and aspens, soft and serene, one of the truly good things about living here. There’s never  I  much traffic so it’s easy to sink into the wilderness and forget about civilization. But when her grey sedan crests a gentle hill, that illusion is dispersed – down below are the blazing flare stack and pistachio-green vinyl sided buildings of Petro-Canada’s Ferrier gas plant. Lyons pulls into the parking lot and reverses into a parking space. All the vehicles, the majority of which are trucks, face out. This is a back-in facility, a safety precaution in the event of an evacuation.

After she enters the main building, Lyons walks past the office, calling out “morning” to the admin staff, and grabs a coffee from the break room down one of the narrow hallways decorated with safety messages from head office. (If she ever forgets what causes accidents, these posters remind her that haste, frustration, fatigue and apathy are the culprits.) Lyons heads down another narrow hallway and passes through the control room, where a bank of computers, monitoring every pulse of the plant’s operations and equipment 24/7, display numbers and intricate graphs in primary colours. Now she’s back outside, walking to the shop. 

The shop has the same queer pistachio vinyl siding as the rest of the plant, and though it was built in the 1960s, it has a temporary attitude, like it’s saying, “Don’t spend too much money on me – I’m not going to be here for long,” It’s a big barn of a building, with a large open space and concrete floors, and like all buildings on site, it’s very neat: everything is tidily in its place. Three tiny rooms – two offices and a neglected bathroom – flank the workshop. In one of the offices, crammed amidst workstations equipped with computers and a touch of personal space, sits Lyons’ desk.

She may have a desk and that desk may be in an office, but Lyons is not a bookkeeper or a clerk. In fact, when I come to visit her, the 24-year-old doesn’t spend any time in the office other than to grab her purse at lunch. And she doesn’t wear pantyhose or polyester suiting or make-up. No, she wears a pair of fire-retardant coveralls over her jeans and layered tees; a bandana covers her strawberry-blond hair to prevent it from getting tangled in her hard hat. Billie is a millwright apprentice, and on her feet she wears a pair of men’s steel-toed boots. “I bought a women’s style once,” she says with a grin. “They were exactly the same as the ones I’m wearing now, except they wore out in a month.”

Funny thing about steel-toed boots. I went to Wal-Mart to purchase the pair I needed in order to visit the Ferrier plant. (Petro-Canada is very safety conscious – one of the many things that impresses Lyons about the company.) I wandered past the men’s footwear first (I was lost) and noticed that an entire wall was dedicated to work boots, with plenty of steel-toed options. But as I trawled the many women’s aisles, overwhelmed by the selection, I couldn’t find a single pair of women’s steel-toed boots. Luckily, considering Lyons’ story, I settled for the smallest men’s size available.

This absence of women’s steel-toed boots seems strange, bordering on ridiculous. Not because women should take to the streets to demand equal opportunity shoe-shopping, but ridiculous because, in the 21st century, neither women’s nor unisex steel-toed boots are available at a shopper’s mecca like Wal-Mart.

Think, for a moment, about those Second World War images of Rosie the Riveter, the woman dressed in coveralls flexing her bicep underneath the slogan “We Can Do It.” OK, she was American, but she was equally a symbol for Canadian women who filled the empty factories when 60,000 men enlisted. Given incentives such as free nurseries and income-tax concessions, more than a million women were working by the war’s end, many on traditionally male turf such as manufacturing and the trades. More than 260,000 women produced war goods, and women accounted for 30% of all labourers in the aircraft industry. Women can do it, so history has proved. But after the war, Ottawa stopped all incentives, effectively pushing women out of male-dominated industries.

Now we’re in the midst of another nationwide labour shortage, one brought on by economic growth and, some might say, poor governmental planning. And nowhere is this shortage more acute than in Alberta, where the provincial government predicts the situation will only get worse. By 2015, it forecasts a human-capital deficit of 86,000 people, with the trades falling 12,000 workers short.

Considering this prediction and coupling it with the potential economic opportunities afforded workers in the trades, you would expect women to be tying on their steel-toed boots in record numbers. And they are: more women are donning hard hats than ever before.

Three years ago, I got a call from a theatre friend who scouts for a local talent agency about a television commercial being shot in Calgary that required a man to play guitar and sing. I auditioned for the McCain’s International Series Thin Crust Texas Barbecue Chicken Pizza ad, waiting in a holding pen with the majority of the city’s roots-rock singer/songwriters. Most of us were wearing country suits and western hats. The commercial’s story arc was brilliant: a young cowboy rises spontaneously from a long table of pizza-eating family and friends and woos a pretty cowgirl at the head of the table by singing “Yellow Rose of Texas.”

I hammed it up when it was my turn, getting down on my knees as though I were pleading. I played the song faster and more energetically than the original and was called back to audition again for the commercial’s director, an L.A. industry type with blonde, shoulder-length hair and a tangible air of self-assurance. (I overheard people say that he’d just come from working on a movie with one of the lesser Baldwin brothers.) “You really want this, hey?” he asked after I laid the cheese on thick, which made me feel both encouraged and ashamed. My third audition was in front of the McCain Foods board, who had flown in from Halifax to make the final decision. They seemed pleased, but it was lunch hour and most were tucking into sandwiches. (The catering got better at each subsequent audition.)

I wasn’t informed I had the part until getting a call at 8 p.m. Go to the Currie Barracks parking lot at 3 a.m., I was told. The barbecue in the commercial was supposed to be taking place at sunset, but for our purposes sunrise could masquerade as sunset, giving us two chances to film the spot in one day.

The amount of equipment and size of the crew on location was ridiculous for a one-minute ad, I thought, knowing how excited my filmmaker friends would be to have such resources for one day. We filmed the courtship scenes dozens of times, from all angles, but I wasn’t allowed to eat the pizza because it had red pepper on it which could get caught in my teeth. All the other actors and extras were told to take bites out of their slices during each take, to chew and nod like they were enjoying it. Pizza with a barbecue sauce base doesn’t taste right at 6 a.m. – one of the girls had to purge behind the barn. The pizzas were replaced when the cheese hardened and started to sweat, usually every other take. Two women doctored the frozen pies by adding freshly cooked green and red pepper and pieces of white chicken breast. One of the ladies at the table said she was so sick of the song, she wanted to smash my guitar, like in that Juicy Fruit commercial.

At 3:30 p.m., the director was calling for the last shot, and by 3:45 p.m. the skies unleashed one hell of a wind and rain storm. As the crew scrambled to cover their gear, I had to go into a barn with the sound guy to record the song another dozen times. Most of the actors had done a number of commercials before and said this was an unusually smooth shoot. “You’re a principal,” I was told over and over. “You’ll get a whack of cash for this.” I shook off the hat head and waited for the royalty cheques to roll in.

A couple of months later, when the commercial first aired, my e-mail inbox was full of “Is that you?” notes.

Corb Lund saw the commercial and he told a mutual friend of ours, “I would never do that.” And of course he shouldn’t. Corb is a cowboy. A real cowboy might seriously damage his stature as a country music artist were he seen dressed up as a Hollywood cowboy, hawking pizza. I, on the other hand, do not play country music and am not a cowboy, therefore my career as a singer/songwriter and my stint as the Pizza Cowboy do not conflict. Very often.

At one of my shows not long after the spot started airing, a nearly hysterical woman and her sister approached me. They had seen the commercial and discovered my true identity. They asked me to please, please, please play “Yellow Rose of Texas.” They were disappointed it wasn’t on any of my CDs. They were at a Kris Demeanor show, but all they wanted was the Pizza Cowboy.

In Grade 8, I joined an extracurricular social studies club called Project Business, designed to help young people learn about supply and demand economics. I signed up because Krista Copper was in it. She had brown feathered hair, eyes like a stunned deer, and wore a corduroy jacket buttoned right up to her chin, which gave her a look of impenetrability that I found alluring. We were to make peanut brittle and sell it at lunch hour, calculating the cost of the peanuts, sugar, molasses and labour time, and fixing a price that would recoup our costs or, even better, make a profit.

The club was divided into three competing groups. I made sure I was in Krista’s, and she set the strategy. The key, she said, was the quality of our peanut brittle. Her mom’s was awesome, so she’d get her mom to make it. We would charge the same price as everyone else, but ours would be better, so we’d sell more. Ours was indeed better, and we did sell more. We made more money, but we used twice as many peanuts, which were the most expensive ingredient. Our expenses were nearly double those of the other groups, and we made less money than everybody else. Krista was demoted from club president to treasurer and I joined flag football.

From a slave to ulterior motives to a career in the performing arts, I’ve spent the past 10 years cobbling together a viable existence by writing, performing and recording original music as Kris Demeanor, often with my Crack Band. Sure, under the auspices of making a respectable living, I have made halfhearted stabs at biology, architecture, horticulture, English literature, but none stirred in me a sustainable passion. Many people love music, and love to play it, but playing professionally requires a type of enthusiasm akin to mild but unrelenting panic. I liken it to navigating through the maze of mirrors at the Stampede as a child. It was confusing, frustrating, and everywhere was me. I would bash into the glass and cry, but suppress my sobs and get it together so dad wouldn’t have to rescue me. I’d go in again the next year.

Life as a touring musician is one of thrilling variety and profound uncertainty. I have been involved in theatre, film, public education, television and spoken word, putting as many fingers into as many pies as I can without feeling like a cheap huckster. Most artists, in their early years, and often throughout their careers, need “real” jobs to supplement their grand ideas. By real, I mean any job with a defined payment structure, with shifts of a set time frame. When the Crack Band and I play to drunken snowboarders at the Rose and Crown in Banff for $300 and nobody listens until an insufferably insistent guy crashes the stage and plays “American Pie” to grateful screams, we call it a paid rehearsal, a punch-the-clock gig. Sometimes, a great gig pays good money; it doesn’t feel like a real job when you’re backstage at a folk festival chatting with Bruce Cockburn in the port-a-let lineup.

Usually, though, it’s difficult to quantify where art meets making a living, or what is a satisfying experience as opposed to a perversely interesting one. Creating quality art sucks time and energy, and it takes years for the monetary payoff to come close to equaling the time and personal resources spent realizing the vision. An artist’s ongoing internal debate bats around many questions: How much do I need in order to live comfortably? Will CD sales and live shows pay the bills? Should I focus on publishing and write a cookie-cutter country hit? Learn a bunch of Neil Diamond songs and do corporate parties? If I do these things, am I still an artist? Who cares? Where is the romance in being an artist of unwavering integrity when Alberta Health sends the collection agency after you? Do I party because I’m a musician or did I become a musician because I like to party?

Most musicians I know are in a perpetual state of unease, continually revisiting these questions and revising our answers, knowing that we’ll be asked, at family parties, by old friends at bars, and by other artists, “So, can you survive doing just music?” We all want to look at them squarely and say, “Yes, that is all I do. I live humbly by some standards, but I stand before you, clearly surviving.”

Many artists have colourful “real job” histories, though not because they have a lot of interests. They love their art, and secondary loves such as cooking and bird watching don’t make any money. An artist’s catalogue of real jobs is unique because they take whatever outside work they can, only when they absolutely have to or when it’s convenient, jobs with flexible schedules, jobs devoid of deep responsibility.

By global standards, of course, we enjoy lives of ridiculous comfort and wealth (understanding this helps us through the droughts).

And, like every successful business, we’re helped by the supportive “teams” we’ve compiled: encouraging parents and spouses, understanding bandmates, the odd fan-turned-patron, a friend with some industry clout, the Canada Council. Still, it’s a tenuous existence, because not only are we trying to create decent art, we are also trying to invent our own job niches. The dangerous thing about saying goodbye to real jobs is that the more time passes without one, the more impossible it is to imagine ever getting one again. But then, the most dangerous animals are the hungriest.

Let me regress.

What’s your name and age?
j'Amey Holroyd, 30

What's your title?
I’m a boilermaker by trade, but right now I’m working with an apprenticeship agency as the boilermaker apprentice administrator. We oversee apprenticeship contracts and the process of apprenticeships through their system. We help apprentices, make sure they get to school at the right time, help them if they’re struggling.

What does a boilermaker do?
We work in industrial locations. We fabricate, erect, maintain and repair industrial components (such as power plants, chemical and gas plants, refineries).

Why did you go into trades?
I went to college and realized that everything I thought it would be, it wasn’t. A couple of my friends were getting apprenticeships, and I thought it was such an excellent way to learn. I actually took horsemanship program for two years, so I have a diploma in that. This has worked very well to fund my hobby. I have my own farm and my own horses.

What do you love about your job?
Definitely there is something new and challenging to do almost every day. The tasks that we’d do, you could step back and see some accomplishment in what you’d done. I liked that there was always opportunities to learn – you aren’t always doing the same thing. It keeps things interesting. You can travel all over Alberta and Canada with this ticket.

What are the biggest obstacles you’ve faced as a woman in a predominantly male profession?
I think it would have to be staying positive, and not taking to hear opinions of people who might have been unsure of my abilities. My mom would say it’s no one’s businesses what they think of you. But I think that’s a universal thing, no matter what gender you are. Overall, I’ve had an excellent experience with the boilermakers. Had a lot of support, a lot of mentors. There is always some sense of hesitation, but once I’m there for awhile, everyone has been very helpful.

What’s the best way to encourage more women to enter the trades?
Just to let them know that it’s a viable option. There are so many trade options out there. There is probably one that is a good fit for you, because they’re so diverse. Just need some investigation and some research.

What's your name and age?
Jill Flathmann, 29

What’s your title?
I’m an apprentice heavy duty mechanic with Finning in Calgary. I go to school at SAIT for two months of every year, and the other 10 months, I’m working. After four years you’re considered a journeyman.

What exactly do you do?
Right now I’m working on construction equipment for Finning. When new equipment comes in, we’ll customize it for the customer, like installing a thumb (on an excavator’s bucket, the thumb is an attachment on top that would clamp onto of the bucket). Then they moved me into the swamp, which is just general repair on dozers, excavators. Third-year schooling is a lot of power trains, so they put me in the transmission bay.

Why did you go into the trades?
I graduated as a chemical technologist, and I was making between $9 to $12 an hour. A few of my friends were heavy duty mechanics, and they were having so much fun on their jobs. So I stumbled into it and stayed there ever since.

What do you love about your job?
I really like the challenges of it. I like the physical tasks of taking things apart and learning how they work.
 
What’s the biggest obstacle you’ve faced?
The guys have been really good to me; I haven’t experienced any outright chauvinism. I do hear the odd comment here and there, but nothing major. No one has been rude or made fun of me. The hardest part is someone not telling me everything that I need to know to do my job really well – in which case I’ll ask someone else. There is something I’ve been learning about; a lot of mechanics who are really good – or even not really good – they withhold information, so they’ll make you struggle a little more, and I’ve heard rumours that it’s a job security thing. If the other mechanic knows more, their job may be at risk. So I have noticed it can be tough to get questions answered, and there’s so much to learn. A lot of what they take for granted is so new to me.

What’s the best way to encourage more women to enter the trades?
It’s a personal choice. If a woman is really questioning it, I would say don’t let your doubt stop you, or fear what men will think. If they doubt they can do it, they can do it. According to Workers Comp, the maximum load you can lift is 50 pounds. So if a woman can do that, go for it.

I’ve spent the past 10 years building refineries, pipelines, oilsands plants, diamond mines, highways, shopping malls and SuperNet. I’ve made money buying and selling properties. I drive a truck, a sports car and a motorcycle, and when I’m not working I like to race. But when my father died, I shifted gears.

I was born on February 26, 1975, at 10:50 a.m. in downtown Edmonton. Mom reminds me of the time every year. It’s one of those things mom does. When I was a kid we lived in the first house way down south on 16th Avenue. There was nothing past us except for Cheapo Joe’s Driving Range, so I grew up playing on construction sites. I wasn’t supposed to.

I went to high school for five years but never graduated. I was into art class. I didn’t care much for most of the other things. Learned how to play hacky sack pretty good. If I had stuck in school, I probably would’ve become an architect. I think that’s what got me interested in construction, especially the industrial side, because you’re building these enormous things.

I had summer jobs starting from the time I was eight. I worked with my mom’s first husband – he’s not my dad; him and her never married. I did landscaping until I was 14, every summer, six days a week, sunrise to sunset. My stepdad was an entrepreneur and owned the company. His buddy had his own business, too: coin-operated pool tables, juke boxes, video games. I worked with him part-time. In the winter, I also helped my friend’s dad. He was a tire serviceman, so we’d run around changing tractor-trailer units in -30, -40 weather. Seeing their transactions and being around people who were in business, I’m self-taught, I guess, absorbing the ways of life.

I started at the Lilydale processing plant in 1994 on my 19th birthday. I’d worked at the Workers’ Compensation Board as a summer student, so I knew a few things about workplace injuries and repetitive strain. I started out making wieners – beef, chicken, sausage – on the assembly line. My job was to pick up about 15, 20 pounds of wieners and put them on bakers’ racks, and they went into the smoker. That was eight hours a day, non-stop. I worked there about three months. I knew sooner or later my arms were going to give.

One nice spring morning I woke up – I had paid off my bike, a Kawasaki ZX7 – and I said, “I’m not going to work. I’m going to ride my bike.” They didn’t want to train me for any other positions and I knew I was going to get hurt eventually. My mom called me up on my cell and asked if I was at work. I was down in Hawrelak Park and told her I’d decided to quit. She told me that the guy who’d replaced me was scraping out the hopper – which is where you put the paste to make the wieners – and his arm got caught somehow and was separated at the shoulder. It was some kind of karma thing.